


No matter the distance (I'm holding your hand)

by lonelywalker



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 05:00:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4733615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-1x18. Harrison Wells is the Reverse Flash. Except he can't be, can he? Because Caitlin Snow is having his baby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No matter the distance (I'm holding your hand)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Vienna Teng's "Harbor".

_“I don’t understand. What do the Reverse Flash and Dr. Wells have to do with each other?”_

_“They’re the same person.”_

_She shakes her head. “That’s impossible.”_

The conversation between the four of them goes on for over an hour: Cisco admitting to his strange nightmares and waking dreams, Barry taking them through the evidence related to his mom’s death, and Joe explaining his own suspicions. She listens, mouth dry, heart thumping, and takes it all in despite not wanting to hear another word. 

There’s _nothing_ concrete. With the evidence they have, Joe himself would be a more likely suspect. Dr. Wells is paralyzed, for a start. She hasn’t just been taking his word for it for the past year – she’s seen the records, done the scans. And it’s as if not a single one of them had seen him being beaten mercilessly by the man in yellow at Christmas. Those bruises of his, the ripped skin she’d had to stitch closed with her own hands… They’d been _real_. _He’s_ real. He’s exactly the same person now as he’s been for the years they’ve seen each other almost every day. Not the most sociable person, not the easiest to understand, but a good man. A man she trusted with her life even after Ronnie died. A man who’s _saved_ her life more than once.

But she says nothing, because she knows they’re all too far gone. Barry’s too personally invested in his mother’s death, and who can blame him? Cisco’s freaked out by dreams that may or may not have any kind of basis in reality. And who is she to question Joe, who’s been a cop for longer than she’s been alive?

So she sits and frowns and nods along, her stomach churning with anxiety, her heart pounding so hard and fast it’s a miracle no one can hear it.

After they’ve exhausted all discussion, after they’ve sworn each other to secrecy, she gives Cisco a ride back to his apartment. Troubled, quiet, he doesn’t even suggest that they could watch some _Big Bang Theory_ to take their minds off things. She’s relieved. If she waited, if she went with him, she knows she’d just curl up on his old couch and doze off, her resolve ebbing away. So once the door to the building closes, she checks her mirrors, signals, and heads toward a house that, as far as Cisco knows, she’s only visited once before.

She thinks as she goes that Barry could easily be following her. Or even Joe. Would she notice? She’s not exactly used to covering her trail, and in any case taking a circuitous route would make no difference to Barry. So she heads straight there, parking just inside the gates he daringly never locks, and kills the engine.

It’s been getting difficult to keep it a secret. The first six weeks had been easy enough, apparently, because she’d even been able to keep it a secret from herself. Maybe the signs hadn’t been as obvious as they could’ve been – everyone feels a bit sick in the winter, right? – but the truth was she’d deliberately ignored them, pushed away every thought, told herself it wasn’t possible when she knew it absolutely was. And then the last couple of months… she’s been meaning to tell them. She _has_ to tell them sometime. But life as part of Team Flash is never quiet. They’re always amid some huge city-in-peril crisis, and then when they’re not, it’s hard to interrupt everyone’s joyous high-fives to drop a different sort of bomb on them. Still, she’s had to push her tight-fit dresses to the back of her closet, wear pants that sit a little lower on her hips, go shopping for new bras. She feels _so_ obvious every single day she sits in the Cortex, but none of them has commented on her fuller breasts or looser clothes. Not one single gaze has lingered.

She lays a hand against her belly, against the undeniable curve. More than three months, now. Sure, some women go the whole nine somehow never even being aware themselves, but she’s always been slim, always been the skinny kid her relatives would insist ate another portion at Thanksgiving. Nowhere to hide.

And what was she doing three, four months ago? She was here, sitting in her car in the darkness, chewing on her lip, and _wanting_. It was something that had been stirring in her for a long, long time. 

He’d always been attractive, charming, and when he smiled at her – which was often – she found herself imagining what it might be like to be his. But he’d been unattainable then, or at least she’d assumed he was. Harrison Wells was her hero and her boss, but Ronnie was her boyfriend, and even Ronnie was a catch beyond her wildest teenage dreams. After the accident, though, Harrison was the one thing she could hold on to. An anchor amid a storm, even as he encouraged her to take time off, or to save her career by finding another position elsewhere. When it became just the three of them in the lab, she couldn’t help but think of him as a friend. A friend she discussed her life with, joked with, and somewhere along the line truly fell in love with.

Maybe it was seeing him have faith in something again, the night Barry fought a tornado and won. Maybe it was the way he put his life between Farooq and her own. Maybe it was when she wiped blood from his face, thanking any God who might be listening for sparing his life. All she really understood was that after he risked an entire city for her (and she knows it was for her), it wasn’t Ronnie Raymond she wanted holding her in the night. It hadn’t been Ronnie for a long time.

“Caitlin,” he says when she finally, _finally_ steps out of the car and presses his doorbell. He’s still fully dressed despite the hour, but then she’d never considered the possibility he might be asleep. “Is everything all right?”

The very first time she’d come here, she’d been near tears when they’d gotten lost, baffled by winding streets with no names. She could easily have just grabbed hold of him and hugged him tightly, she’d been so scared by Hartley caving in a roof on top of him. The second time, she didn’t have any restraint left.

“Can I come in?” She still half expects to see a blur of yellow lightning behind her, snatching her away to safety.

“Of course.” He moves back, his chair swiveling around. “Something to drink?”

She wants scotch. He has _excellent_ scotch, the kind her parents would have to remortgage their home to buy. “No… No thank you.”

In his lounge, where a fire flickers brightly behind icy glass, she sits on one of the daybeds and tries to collect her thoughts. The others wouldn’t just say it was a risk to come here. They’d say it was a _stupid_ risk. If coincidences are just coincidences and dreams are just dreams, then there’s no harm done. But if you tell the Reverse Flash you know he’s the Reverse Flash…

He sits opposite her, smiling faintly, his eyes vivid in the light. “I’ve missed you, Caitlin.”

“I’ve missed you too. It’s just… We’ve all been so busy.”

It’s not a lie. They’ve done battle with the Rogues, with the Tricksters, with swarms of robot bees… But then they’d been busy the night she’d come here and said, with scotch-fueled bravery, “I’d really like to kiss you.” She’d cupped his smooth cheeks and leaned in and tasted him, as his arms beckoned her to slip onto his lap, and she instinctively fumbled with his fly without really knowing if he _could_. But he was stiff in her hand, and achingly hard inside her, and murmured, “Why didn’t you say something before?” while she moved over him. When they made love for the second time that night, she took off his glasses and their clothes, and said everything she’d ever wanted to say to him.

She’d spent nights and mornings in his bed, and too many risky times in his office with the door locked, all because he made her feel things she hadn’t felt since before the accident, and maybe she hadn’t felt them that intensely even then. It was never meant to be a secret, just a secret long enough for them to know it was real. She’d never meant for it to be risky, but she’s always had problems with birth control, and… And those were paper-thin excuses, because all she’d really been thinking about was having him inside her, holding her so tightly, kissing her throat and whispering _Caitlin_ with the kind of desperation that only made her want him more.

“I have to tell you something,” she says, still unsure which something that is.

“Okay.” He has to know how much it _melts_ her when he says something as simple and normal as that, rather than his frequent I-learned-English-from-physics-textbooks discourse.

She twists her fingers. “I’d really like you to kiss me.”

Harrison smiles. He bites his lip too when he’s a little unsure. “Then you’d better come here.”

Sometime, months ago, he’d come in a flood inside her, and something had taken hold. Something of him had stayed. And even when she finally admitted it to herself, took a test and saw an ob-gyn and felt her belly finally beginning to swell, she’d never considered not keeping it. She and Ronnie had discussed kids, and calmly decided they’d wait a few years for the sake of their careers and saving up and getting a real house with a yard. Being knocked up at twenty-seven, unmarried, still in her singleton’s apartment, with no career to speak of… That wasn’t in the plan. Except maybe it had been. Maybe it had been an extra little erotic thrill to think about having his baby while she rode him, while she lay in his bed, her thighs slick with his come. She wasn’t Dr. Caitlin Snow, valedictorian, surgeon, scientist when she was with him. She only wanted and needed.

Or, if the others are right, if everything they’ve claimed is true, perhaps the Reverse Flash would have his reasons for encouraging her desire for him. Perhaps he would find yet another way to bind her to him, get her on his side. And yet… she can’t look at him, remembering every moment she’s known him, and honestly believe that.

She gets up, her heart pounding once more, and stands before him, her knees brushing his. When she leans in, his fingers thread through her hair and his lips part to greet hers. This reserved man of science has always been unexpectedly passionate when they’re together, but she doesn’t appreciate it now, no matter how much she wants to be curled up safe in his arms. She pulls away just a little, bracing herself on the arm of his chair, and takes his hand.

His fingers are gentle, warm even though her clothes as she presses his palm to her, just below her navel. He touches, he feels, and his too-blue eyes flick up to meet hers. "Are you sure?" he says, and it's every question in one: that she’s pregnant, that it’s his, that she’s keeping it.

She nods, releasing his hand. “Yes.”

He sits back in his chair, sweeping his glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think that I… I didn’t know it was possible.”

“Because you’re a metahuman?” They’ve had discussions back and forth about reproductive effects at the lab. Nothing decisive.

His eyes narrow just a little. “No. Not because of that.”

So that secret of his is out, and she’s still breathing. The very fact he hasn’t tried to lie to her gives her enough foolish courage to press on in search of more truths. “Because you’re not Harrison Wells.” She’s still so close to him. But if Barry and Joe are right, it wouldn’t matter if she were on the other side of the room, or the other side of the world.

“I’ve been Harrison Wells for a long, long time. But yes. My DNA was acquired in an unusual manner. I doubt it could be replicated.”

“The tests…” She’s run scans on him a dozen times for various reasons over the years: after the Reverse Flash attacked him, after Farooq, after risks of radiation exposure.

“My AI takes care of those.”

Then nothing she’s ever known about him can be taken for granted. Not his identity, not his DNA, not his shattered spine. “And you can walk?”

“I can run,” he says. “I can run faster than light, faster than time. Or I could, once. But I’m still faster than Barry. Always one step ahead.”

All the other questions seem pointless. She knows the answers and doesn’t want to hear them. And there are other questions she can’t ask, although Cisco and Joe and Barry would. Who is he really? Where is he from? Why did he murder Barry’s mother? Why has he been helping them save people for so long? Why did he save Ronnie and Martin?

But she looks at him, her palm having unconsciously found its way to the gentle curve of her belly. Something of his inside her, growing within her. A spark of lightning that’s begun to warm a body that’s been cold since the accident, changing her with every day that goes by. If there are any more days. 

There’s something people ask in the trashy movies she watches with Cisco on the weekends when they’re both avoiding families and social lives: helpless women, usually, looking into the eyes of the soulless killer and saying, pitifully, “Are you going to kill me?” Caitlin’s not exactly a kung fu expert, but she’s been tied up on top of a bomb before, and she’s always thought their time would be better spent trying to run, or kicking the guy in the balls. 

This, though, isn’t a soulless killer. This is Harrison, never mind how much he also isn’t Harrison.

“Show me,” she says instead.

He lifts a hand and it shimmers, buzzes in the air. After a moment, he closes his fist and red lightning crackles.

She should be scared. Terrified. She should never have come here. She wants to live, to save lives, to make a difference. She wants there to be days when she can walk into work without worrying if even eternally-preoccupied, does-any-woman-except-Iris-even-exist Barry might notice her bump. She wants to grow big with their baby, her breasts heavy with milk, to hold their child in her arms, to be a mother. And also to be his, forever and always.

Harrison sighs, grips the chair arms with both hands, and stands up. She’d half forgotten how tall he is. That must have been the reason for the chair. Because now she can’t help looking at him and seeing his lithe, muscled runner’s physique. Even his running shoes. She wonders how many times they’ve burst into flames while tearing around STAR Labs.

“What now?” Her voice is quiet, but not shaky. She’s worked in ERs and with the Flash. Stress doesn’t affect her like other people. She doesn’t fall apart.

He cocks his eyebrow a little, reaches to smooth back her hair, and kisses her. He should feel different, taste different, yet everything is the same as it once was. Her heart races. She’s warm, leaning into him, her fingers grasping the back of his neck, pressing his lips to hers, as his arms slip around her. “What do you want to happen now?” he asks.

“I want you to be Harrison Wells.” She hugs him, then, his black sweater soft against her cheek. If she holds onto Harrison tightly enough, maybe her concept of who he is won’t simply disappear. “Whatever it is you’re planning, they don’t have to find out. They don’t really know anything.”

“They will.”

“You can stop them. Just be… Just be the man we love. Be our hero.”

A pause. “I’m not a hero,” he says. “I’m-”

“Just a man who was struck by lightning?” She looks up at him, echoing his words from a year ago, before Barry took on the tornado. “Harrison, you’ve saved dozens, hundreds of lives in the last year. Including mine. I know there’s a lot I don’t know, that I might never know, but I know that wasn’t an accident. I know you’re a good man.”

“You’re wrong.” But he keeps holding her, and she feels his lips against her hair. “You were brave to come here.”

“What are the others going to do? Kill you? Stick you in a pod? Or you’ll kill them? We can stop all that. We can be a team. Fight the bad guys.”

He takes a breath. “I _am_ a bad guy.”

“You’re not.” She pulls back, enough to find his hand, to make him feel her belly again. “Whatever’s been driving you, it doesn’t matter more than this. You talked to me about home? This is your home. Me. Our baby. Our _team_.”

He pulls her blouse from her pants, slides his hand up under, resting it there. His warmth sends a chill through her. “And you’d have me keep up this charade? The name. The chair. Even the glasses…”

“The name, yes. The other things we can find a solution for.” Vision problems are easy enough to fix that it would be a lie anyone would accept. The chair is more difficult, but they’d all believed he was paralyzed in the first place. Why not accept a gradual return of function? Particularly if she, the doctor, endorsed it?

“And my speed… The red lightning… They’ll never believe I’m anything but a murderer if they find out.”

At least he’s considering it, asking all the right questions. “Then they won’t find out. Or if they do, we’ll deal with it then. Without any of us winding up dead. Harrison… we need you. And you need us.”

He’s not looking at her anymore. Not meeting her eyes, at least. His fingers move to begin unbuttoning her blouse. “I have to consider it,” he says after the third button. “It’s been fifteen years, Caitlin. To stay, after all I’ve done… Or I can take you with me. Both of you.”

“Take us where?”

“Home.” He pushes her open blouse back off her shoulders, and she lets it fall.

It’s a new experience, having him undress her: usually it’s been much simpler for her to do it herself. And it’s new, too, to have someone who isn’t an ob-gyn see her like this. Cisco and Barry’s lack of reaction in the office tell her there genuinely isn’t that much to see. But it’s different once he unzips her skirt and unclasps her bra, once she’s standing in front of him and all those glass windows in only her panties, with her breasts and belly swollen because of him. No, not just him. Because of them both. Something they’ve made, however inadvertently, together.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, his fingertips stroking ever-so-lightly over one hard, dark nipple.

She shakes her head. “No. It’s good.” If anything, it’s better than it was months before. Her entire body wants him more now, and it’s not as if he didn’t make her mindless and stupid with desire then. 

“Mm.” He kisses her, his hand cupping her breast. “Caitlin, tell me if this isn’t what you want.”

“Oh God. Of course it’s what I want.” There are more than one or two reasons why, as she grabs a fistful of his sweater, demanding that she’s not the only one near-naked in his lounge. 

She’d loved the discovery of his hard, muscular body the first time, when it had been a strange dissonance for a quantum physicist, and even for a quantum physicist who relied on his upper body. Now she looks at him and sees the altered DNA, just like Barry’s, that heals at extraordinary rates, devours body fat, builds lean muscle. There are so many questions she should ask, as a doctor and scientist, and as the woman bearing his child. But she can intuit most of the answers, and there are things she doesn’t want to hear spoken aloud. At least, not now.

Harrison eases out of his sweater and undershirt, tossing them behind him, toward the chair. He unbuckles his belt.

 _He can vibrate_ , she thinks when he’s laid her out on one of the daybeds, parted her legs, and knelt between them. A blushing Barry had told them what had happened when things had got hot and heavy between him and Linda, and she was only human for thinking about the idea then. But Harrison’s always been good at this, so good that it wasn’t even something he offered up as compensation for not having – or pretending not to have – the use of his legs. He loves having his mouth on her, kissing her there, flicking his tongue over her clit while she tangles her fingers in his hair and swears she’ll kill him if he stops. If he brings superpowers into it, she might just stroke out right there, no matter how much she thinks about nuns or baseball.

It’s crazy how good it is, feeling the wetness between her legs after she’s come, her breaths still just gasps, warmth ebbing and flowing in her body. Harrison slips out of his briefs and moves over her. Her belly’s not big enough yet to be any kind of obstacle, but he strokes it as he kisses her, and she’d underestimated the _relief_ of telling him, of now being able to show off her once-shameful truth.

“I’m going to get big,” she says. That truth is terrifying when she thinks about it: all the months ahead of her, full of changes and growth. “Soon.”

Harrison smiles. “Good.” His hand slides lower, and her legs twitch. “I want you to be healthy.”

“You’re… taking this all very well.”

“I panic faster than the speed of light.” His lips are unexpectedly soft on hers. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

She’s never felt him move in her before, push inside and thrust while her legs curl around him. Being on top had been nice too – more than nice – but this is something beyond the pleasure and intimacy they’d found then. Maybe it’s her more-sensitive body, maybe the thrill of fear, or just that beautiful snap of his hips, the sweet deepness of him inside her. She’d thought he might be anxious, scared, uncertain. Instead, he gives her exactly the almost-hurt she needs. She comes tightly around him, fingers pressing into his back so hard they’ll leave bruises she’ll never see. It’s not his name, but she says it anyway, _making_ it his name: “Harrison, Harrison, _Harrison_.”

“Cait,” he says in response. “Oh Caitlin.”

They lie together for what seems like a long time afterward, the fire still blazing, the outside world still dark and long before dawn. Harrison is still every inch the gentle, thoughtful lover she’d had before tonight, his hand exploring the curves and slopes of her body like a curious new husband might. 

“You need to convince them.” She wants to drift off to sleep by his side, but tomorrow will be here far too soon, bringing with it the need to hide everything again. “If there’s evidence, you have to destroy it.”

Harrison bites his lip, thinking. “I never anticipated this. In fifteen years, I never did.”

“We’re not the first two people in the world this has ever happened to.”

His fingers leave ruffled hair in their wake. “These are some unique circumstances. This baby was never meant to happen in any timeline. But yes, I’ll pick up the breadcrumbs. I’ll be Harrison Wells.”

Caitlin rolls over onto her side, cups his face with her hand. “You _are_ Harrison Wells.”

In his bedroom, she presses him down among pillows, slides his hardness inside her again.

When she wakes up, hours later, sunlight just barely breaking outside, he’s gone. But there are so many innocent reasons for that, and she badly needs her sleep, so she nestles into his remaining warmth between the blankets and dozes off again.

The sudden breeze against her face wakes her, and there’s still a shimmer of red lightning in the air when she opens her eyes. “Where were you?” she asks as he slips back in beside her, setting a golden ring on the stand by the bed.

“Mm, Starling City.”

“You ran to Starling City.” She squints at the time through bleary eyes. “And back.”

“There was some evidence that needed to be relocated.” He’s not vibrating, not exactly, but there’s something about his breathing that would alarm her if he were Barry. “If I were Joe, which fortunately I’m not, my next move in this investigation would take me there.”

Joe had mentioned something about that last night, something she’d barely taken in. But she’s read the _Wells_ biography too. “You used to live there.”

“I did.”

She nudges closer to him, placing her hand on his chest. “Whenever we had business at the lab there, you always sent me or Cisco or Hartley.”

“Yes.”

With what she knows now, his impenetrable private life makes a lot of sense. But it had made a lot of sense before, too, for other reasons. She’d seen the evidence of it on Barry’s sparse board, together with a newspaper article about the untimely death of Dr. Tess Morgan.

“Did you know her?” she asks tentatively. “Did you really know her? Tess?”

He swallows, and she can feel him almost shiver with tension. “I killed her,” he says. “And then I knew her. Really knew her. I knew about the day we met at a conference in Coast City, when I was nervous about my presentation and even more nervous about talking to her. I knew about the night she took me home and kissed me. I knew all about the day we’d had at the beach, drinking champagne and talking about our dreams for the future, before I ended both of our futures forever. And tonight I went back to where she died, where I killed her, where I couldn’t save her.”

“You have his memories?” She’s not sure who she means anymore.

“The technology I used was a prototype even in my time. Here, I was forced to make it quickly, out of materials that weren’t ideal. If anything, you might say it worked too well. It gave me his DNA, his body. And it gave me everything he felt or knew or remembered about her, too.” Harrison blinks, stares at the ceiling. “I can rationalize it as much as I want, that none of it was ever real for me, that I never so much as spoke to her, let alone spent years of my life with her. But going there tonight was like-”

“Like going into the pipeline where your fiancé was vaporized.”

As he turns to her, the sudden understanding on his face changes into something darker. “No. I won’t compare what I did to that. You weren’t responsible for his death. I deserve every moment of pain those memories give me.”

“You weren’t responsible for her death either. Not the Harrison Wells I know. Not the person you became that night.”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it.” His lips purse and he looks away. “This person I became is responsible for numerous other deaths either way, Caitlin.”

“And how many lives? How many lives has Barry saved, because of you? You brought back Ronnie and Martin. This is Harrison Wells’ baby I have inside me. Not whoever that other person once was.”

He doesn’t need to open his mouth for her to already know what he’ll say. But he licks his lips instead, takes a breath, and moves his hand to touch her again. “Can you feel it yet?”

“Not yet. A few more weeks.” She wants that more than anything, those first flutterings, real proof of a life stirring inside her. “Did… did you and Tess ever want children?”

It’s a long moment before he moves, shifting position to get more comfortable and take her into his arms. “We were so busy,” he says, and she feels him relax as he says it. “So much to do, establishing the lab, getting funding. But if anyone could’ve done all that while pregnant, or with a couple of kids running around, it would’ve been Tess… Or you. She would’ve loved you.”

“Are you saying you have a type, Dr. Wells?” Her voice is muffled against his chest.

“Astoundingly intelligent, capable, beautiful women who somehow tolerate me? Yes. Apparently so.”

“A _couple_ of kids, though? Don’t get ahead of yourself, Doctor. Let’s survive this one first.”

In an hour, they’ll have to pretend. She’ll have to drive back home and go into the lab in her I’m-not-pregnant clothes, see him using the chair he doesn’t need, endure the silent plotting of Barry and Cisco. Soon they’ll know about the baby, which will only make them more suspicious for a while, but there will be no evidence to find. And then in six months, in a year, there will be more truths to be told. Like where his home truly is, and whether she wants to go there with him.

He’s _not_ Harrison Wells. Or, at least, he wasn’t always. But he has to be now, for all their sakes.

She lifts her head and kisses him. “Still, we _could_ get some practice in now.”

He laughs against her lips. “What do they say? There’s no time like the present.”

(This time, he vibrates.)


End file.
